The myth of Icarus whose waxed feather wings melted away because he flew too close to the sun is an early record of an object falling back to Earth. A more recent atmospheric entry is that of the modular Russian space station Mir on 23 March 2001. The debris scattered over an area of more than 1500 kilometres in the Pacific Ocean.

Deorbit is an observation mission with a mind of its own. It too is a rebellious entity – with a mission to reconstruct knowledge retrieved from space-objects orbiting planets in faraway systems. If we imagine Icarus, let us picture him with a camera, his lens scanning the universe, the most immeasurable depths of space, its outer edges visible only as pixels and black RGB values. The information he sends back comes in tiny packages, bits of data. These compressed images are sucked into the black hole of film, devoured by the universe of grain, and burned onto the celluloid surface. The scanned and observed universe is restructured into a new cosmos in the machine.

Our cosmos is made of the collisions between the two extremes – immeasurably macro and micro. Deorbit is a journey that starts at one end, in the vast darkness of the outer rim of space, and passes over the Earth’s oceans, mountain ranges, and deserts, and ends at the other, smashing into the atoms of the celluloid grain itself. It is a transfer from analogue to digital and back again, from massive to subatomic and beyond.

INFORMATION
2013 / 17′ / 35 mm / 1:2.35 / stereo / a part of the Vertical Cinema project
Image & sound by Makino Takashi & Telcosystems
Drums by Balázs Pándi
Production, distribution by Sonic Acts Festival

SCREENINGS – updated on the Vertical Cinema website.
Göteborg Film Festival, SE, 2018
Inversia Festival, Murmansk, RU, 2018
Otras luces video exhibition, Pamplona, ES, 2017
GEGENkino, Leipzig, DE, 2016
Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF), AU, 2015
Balta Nakts, Riga, LV, 2015
STRP Biennale, NL, 2015
South by Southwest Festival, US, 2015
Glasgow Short Film Festival, UK, 2015
Leeds International Film Festival, UK, 2014
Stedelijk Museum, NL, 2014
International Film Festival Rotterdam, NL, 2013
Kontraste Festival, Krems, AT, 2013 – world premiere

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Read an interview about the film – In the Eye of The Machine.